important as signs and significations but that only recently have begun to receive
their due. Recently, like a number of authors, I have taken an affective turn with
this work, drawing on a combination of Spinoza, Freud, Tomkins, Ekman,
Massumi, and a host of feminist theorists, as well as biological traditions including
evolutionary theory and ethology, in order to understand affect as the way in which
each ‘thing’ in acting, living, and striving to preserve its own being is ‘nothing but
the actual essence of the thing’ (Spinosa et al. 199 7 ).Thus,
There is no longer a subject, but only individuating affective states of an
anonymous force. The plane is concerned only with movements and rests,
with dynamic affective charges: the plane will be perceived with whatever it
makes us perceive, and then only bit by bit. Our ways of living, thinking or
writing change according to the plane upon which we find ourselves.
(Spinoza, cited in Alliez 200 4 b: 2 7 )All of this said, I do want to retain a certain minimal humanism. Whilst refusing
to grant reflexive consciousness and its pretensions to invariance the privilege
of occupying the centre of the stage, dropping the human subject entirely seems
to me to be a step too far. I have done much to rid myself of an object that often
seems to me to be a user-illusion – in my writings, there is ‘no longer such a thing
as a relatively fixed and consistent person – a person with a recognizable identity
- confronting a potentially predictable world but rather two turbulences enmeshed
with each other’ (Phillips 1999: 20). Still, I am uncomfortably aware that, taken
to extremes, a resolutely anti-humanist position parodies the degenerative path
taken in the nineteenth century from Rousseau through Balzac to Bergson, from
‘an ideal of an immanent community, the subsequent emergence of a strictly
codified bourgeois subject capable of constructing and manifesting itself “aes-
thetically” through gesture and the eventual somatization of that individual body
to a condition of mere potentiality’ (Hewitt 2005: 103). This degeneration can
be seen equally as a movement from intention to automation as the industrial
systems of that century took hold. Whatever the case, I want to keep hold of a
humanist ledge on the machinic cliff face. I hold to a sense of personal authorship,^35
no matter that the trace is very faint and no matter that the brain is a society,
different parts of which are dynamically and differentially connected to all manner
of environments. And the reason? Because how things seem is often more
important than what they are.
The fact is that it seems to each of us that we have conscious will. It seems
we have selves. It seems we have minds. It seems we are agents. It seems we
cause what we do. Although it is sobering and ultimately accurate to call this
an illusion, it is a mistake to think the illusory is trivial.
(Wegner 2002: 3 4 1–3 4 2)Further, this conscious will is bolstered in at least three ways. To begin with there
is the special constitutional significance of joint action and its particular way of
Life, but not as we know it 13